Hands Slipping Apart

On a particularly cold day last week, Squints and I went for a walk.  He didn’t bother with gloves.  And his baseball hat did little to protect him from the wind that bit at his ears.  He hunched into himself, balled up his hands and drew them into the sleeves of his coat.  “It’s cold, Mom.” 

I took his left hand in my right.  Rubbed the back of it with my gloved thumb to warm him a bit.

And we along walked in silence, hand in hand.

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Expectations

In the middle of Mass, Squints leaned towards me and whispered.  “Mom, what’s Black Friday?”

I leaned back.  Whispered bullet points.  “Day after Thanksgiving.  Everything goes on sale.”

He chewed on this for awhile before asking,“Is that a Holy Day?”

 I turned towards him.  “Where would you get that idea?”

“Well, at the stores, there are signs on the windows for Christmas and Black Friday so I…”

“It’s not a Holy Day.”

The day after Thanksgiving, we will not hold a vigil outside the store, waiting for gleaming doors to glide open and admit us.   No, we will spend the day after Thanksgiving in our usual manner.  The day after Thanksgiving, we will dip caramels.

My sister has already prepared several batches of caramel: melting copious amounts of sugar and stirring in ingredients I’m not allowed to reveal here.  As I write this, the caramel waits in rectangular baking dishes for warm hands to soften it and remove it from the pan.  The caramel waits for warm hands to shape it into bite-sized pieces.  The caramel waits for its thick shell of chocolate.

We’ve fallen into a pattern: Three or four of us will shape the caramels; Two or three will dip.  A runner will take cookie sheets full of glistening caramels to the dining room to cool and harden.

Cousins, together again at last, will talk and laugh and catch up.  Occasionally, a younger cousin will be recruited to grab a handful of caramels from the dining room and pass them around.  Orthodontist recommendations will be ignored. 

We will work for several hours in this way, dipping and talking and sampling a caramel or two.  When the caramel is gone, we will move on to peanut clusters.  And sometime after noon, my sister will begin cooking the several hundred pierogi (another secret family recipe) she also made in the weeks before Caramel Day.  For the second day in a row, we will overeat, stuffing ourselves with brats and pierogi and caramel, of course.

No, Squints, Black Friday is not a Holy Day.  But Caramel Day is sacred.  We shape our lives around around this day. 

After lunch, we will clean up and pack up the candy and head home to hide the candy from our children.  Because that candy will become Christmas gifts.  Teachers receive candy.  Neighbors receive candy.  Relatives and friends receive that candy.  In late October, past recipients of this treasure begin making their inquiries: “Are you making candy this year?”  People have come to expect it.  And if their box is a bit smaller than last year’s, they will not hesitate to let you know.  That candy has become legendary. 

I do not give it away lightly.

* * *

After Mass, we ate breakfast, and, on this day of rest, Squints and my husband set out to rake leaves.  

An hour later, Squints came in.  “Whew, I’m beat.”  He took out a saucepan and measured out milk.  “Seven bags, Mom.  Well, really only six because we had to fill one twice.  The wind blew it over and everything spilled out.”  He turned on the gas and added cocoa power and too much sugar to the milk.  He stirred.

The woman who lives behind us emerged, rake in hand.  She raked for a few minutes then lifted a small handful of leaves into the bag. 

Squints added his secret ingredient—peppermint sprinkles—to his cocoa.

The woman’s bag blew over.

“Squints,” I said, watching him take a taste of his cocoa and smacking his lips.  “Look there.”  I pointed.   “Wouldn’t it be nice to go help her rake leaves?”

He looked at me.  Frowned.  “I just…”

“Who knows?  Maybe you’ll land a lawn service job.”

He set the spoon down.  “You think she’d pay me?”

“I’ll keep an eye on your cocoa.”

“OK.” 

“Don’t expect any money.”

"I won't.  He shrugged his coat back on and headed outside.  I watched him approach, rake in hand.  I watched her pause, rake poised above the leaves.  I could hear Squint’s voice in my head.  Want some help?

I watched a smile blossom across her face.  I watched my son raking leaves for a woman he’d never met.  I watched two people, separated by half a century come together in a trivial task.  I wondered why it had taken me seven years to figure this out.

Forty-five minutes later, Squints came home, grinning from ear to ear.  “She was so happy, Mom!  You should’ve seen her.”  He raised his voice a notch.  “I never thought I’d get three bags filled today!  I’m so pleased!  And look…”  Squints fished around in his pocket and withdrew a folded bill.  “She paid me!”  He poured out his cocoa and sat down to drink it.

“I told her about Destructo.”  He paused, looking out the window.  “She’s a cat person.  She’s been feeding those wild cats.  They live beneath her porch.”

I nodded.

“She told me she’d ring my doorbell the next time she needed help.”  He dipped his spoon into his cocoa.  “She’s really nice, Mom.  And she seems lonely.  I think we should have her over for dinner.”

I paused.  I wanted to help a neighbor, but dinner?  “Well, at least we can make her a box of caramels.”

“Oh, yeah.  I told her all about that.  She’s expecting some this year.”  He patted his pocket to make sure his money was still there and finished his cocoa in silence.

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Falling

“Mom?”  Squints shouted down the stairs, even though he knows we have a rule in this house against shouting.

“What?”  I shouted back up the stairs.  I was busy crocheting; crocheting a hat to go with the scarf I made him last week.  After that I’d have to make hats to match the scarves I’d made my daughters two weeks ago.  I took up my crocheting again and began counting stitches to see where I’d left off. 

“You know how my glasses are always slipping off my nose ever since Zoe crashed into me?”

“Yeah?”

“They just slipped off.” 

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Detachment

I see that the temperature is supposed to go down into the forties tonight.  This morning, I threw open the windows to chase away the heat and the humidity that has hovered in the air since May.  The flies appear to have been listening to the weather forecast: A group of them has taken up residence in the kitchen and I find it fair sport to chase them with a dishtowel.  It’s a battle I often lose.

A couple of days after I lost the War of Tug with Destructo, my eye started flashing—a quick burst of lightning that disappeared immediately.  The flashing began on an inconvenient day: the day of Filibuster’s photo preview: The studio owner greeted us warmly at the door and seated us upon a plush velvet couch before a gigantic movie screen.   She dimmed the lights.

My eye flashed.

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The Gathering Time

Tonight

Night falls gently as my husband and I walk the dogs this evening: The last of the lightning bugs flash lazily.  Clouds gather thick and close.  Water rushes along the sides of the street, but for now, the rain has passed.  From the trees, the katydids sing and respond; sing and respond a harsh percussive three note tune while the crickets offer a gentle lullaby from tall grasses.

Autumn is a time of gathering up: a time for the bringing in of the harvest.  It’s a time for shaking the sand from one’s feet and for folding up the beach towels; a time for exchanging flip flops for sturdy shoes and backpacks. 

Autumn is a time to gather in one’s family; to sit extra long at the dinner table, exchanging stories of the day; a time to see the yellow glow of lights in the windows of other houses and know that they, too, have gathered together.

The sun reels in her arms of gold a bit earlier every day; lazily casts them out a bit later; a bit closer every morning.  But it’s too early in the season to tire of the darkness: the change is welcome; comforting; new.

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Twenty Minutes More

“How many more minutes to the bottom?”  A woman gripped her daughter’s hand.  The girl’s knee was mildly bloodied, the result, I was certain of a fall against rock.

I looked at my husband.  “Twenty minutes?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, about that.”

By all rights, we, too, should’ve been heading down the mountain at that hour.  At three o’clock in the afternoon, we were pointed in the wrong direction.

People climb Cadillac Mountain for a variety of reasons: Some attack the mountain, seemingly wanting to prove something to themselves or the other climbers, running up as fast as they can, stabbing feet and cleats and ski poles into the face of the mountain.  Others leisure their way up; stopping here and there to snap pictures of Bar Harbor posing prettily amid colorful boats in Frenchman’s Bay.  Some people, clearly ill, stagger and huff and crawl up the mountain, refusing the hand of a sister or a son waiting patiently a few steps ahead, and it’s these people who I hope make it to the top. 

But this day, we hurried up the mountain.

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Eyes in the Clams

Six years ago, on our first trip to Maine, we went to a restaurant that came recommended by the locals.  We like these sorts of places: You know the food and the service will be good.  Plus, we like to act as if we belong; as if we’re in the know; as if we’re, above all, not tourists. 

This restaurant was really more of a shack than a restaurant and it specialized in fried clams.  It was a dive, but sometimes the worst-looking places turn out to be the best, so we remained stalwartly hopeful. 

We went into the dining room and discovered that all eight of the tables were full of the memories of previous diners: stacked plates, empty corncobs, piles of clamshells, a forlorn-looking exoskeleton of a lobster that an hour before had been swimming in a tank labeled: Caution.  Keep hands out. 

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Fragile

“Do you want some chicken feet for the dog?”  The owner of the farm where we’d rented our cabin nodded at Destructo.  “We’re slaughtering Thursday.” 

“Do you do the butchering yourself?”

He gave a satisfied nod.  “We used to pluck by hand until we were able to make a plucker.” 

Although the farm was hundreds of miles from home, we found we shared a connection: The owner sold wool to a highbrow place near our home; a sterile place whose shoppers, I was sure, wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to the farm and the people and the animals that had produced that wool.  Thus connected, we were invited to gather the eggs from the chickens just outside our cabin; to visit the turkeys and the pigs and the sheep.  We could pet the goats and the horses used to plow the fields.  We were free to milk the cow, provided we got up early enough.  And, of course, the hundred acres were ours to explore.

And we explored with abandon: We passed a hundred-year-old farmhouse and went on to the pigpen where baby durocs no bigger than our—admittedly fat—cat ran round the pen en masse while their mother looked on wearily.  A pasture down, there was another pig, sequestered from a lamb and a couple of horses by a wire fence.  Drying on a wooden fencepost was the horned scalp of a goat.  Here and there, where the rocks would allow, were patches of garden: Scallions and tomatoes and lettuces to the right; Further down the path a bed of peas and green beans, still in season in August.

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Fifteen Dollar Mistakes

“What do you want me to get, Mom?”  Squints grabbed a cart and wheeled it to the produce section.

“A couple of pounds of cheese for sandwiches.”  My kids live on grilled cheese during the summer.  For each sandwich she makes, V puts on four slices of cheese.  And she’ll eat two sandwiches for lunch.

“Snacks?” He waggled his eyebrows at me and grinned.   

They also live on snacks.  Unhealthy, expensive snacks that disappear minutes after they enter the house.  “A bag or two.  We’re on a budget.”

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Affected

This essay was written in response to a prompt from the red dress club:

“This week we would like you to write about how the show of affection has played a part in your memory.

Choose a time when either the abundance or lack of affection (either by you or someone else) stands out, and show us.  Bring us to that time.  Help us feel what you felt.”

Of course, being a word nerd, I turned to my beat-up college dictionary (Webster’s New World) before starting:

1.    A mental or emotional state or tendency; disposition or feeling

2.    Fond or tender feelings, warm liking

3.    A disease; ailment

4.    An attribute or property of a thing

5.    An affecting or being affected

 I think I’ve got definition two covered.  Possibly number five.  Maybe a tinge of three if you look up the word on line.

Anyway, I was really going for a kid’s POV here, as something else I’m writing is written from the perspective of a youngster.

Affected

I was in the third grade.  I wore new baby blue corduroy pants with an elastic waistband and a matching jacket sewn by my mother at the dining room table.  One by one, the teacher called the students to her desk to retrieve their math tests.  Perhaps the tests were in order by grade.  Or alphabetically.  Or maybe they were arranged by row because he passed me on his way to get his paper.

He looked at his test.

His face crumbled in upon itself like a half-eaten apple left to dry in the sun.  He was close to tears.  But in a split second, anger replaced despair.  He snatched the paper from the teacher’s hand and stormed back down the row.  His paper was in his right hand, his pencil in his left.

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What Shall I Be?

This post was written in response to a prompt on the red dress club:

Growing up, my sisters and I loved to play What shall I be?  First appearing in 1966 and categorized as educational, it was proclaimed The Exciting Game of Career Girls.  Based upon the roll of the dice and the acquisition of cards, players would race be the first to line up a job.

The box’s cover featured a dorky-looking girl, herculean pink bow in her hair, index finger on her cheek, looking as if as if couldn’t decide between all those career exciting opportunities.  To her left were six women, one of whom would be this girl’s future self.

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